(I suppose it has some relevance in the antipodes, as Australia and New Zealand both have plentiful private schools, modelled on the British original).

Two passages are especially striking

‘Class advantage in Britain is a disgrace, and that isn’t just a social thing, it’s a life-chances thing. Private education is key to its maintenance. Because we’ve become inured to the disgrace does not lessen the unfairness or the waste of talent. We should step back and recognise it.

Look, I know these stats are forever being trotted out, but don’t be numbed, be angry. Taking into account that only 7 per cent — one in 14 — of our population is privately educated, get this: according to the Sutton Trust, almost three-quarters of top military officers, three-quarters of senior judges, half of leading print journalists, three-fifths of the top ranks of the medical profession, four-fifths of leading newspaper editors, two-fifths of BAFTA winners, a fifth of British music awards winners, nearly a third of MPs and half the cabinet were educated at independent schools. Even Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour shadow cabinet has twice as big a proportion as the population as a whole.

‘National ability and potential cannot possibly be so concentrated in the ranks of the privately educated.’

And then:

So what to do?’ Here’s the good news. State schools have improved a lot under both parties, and are still improving. From Kenneth Baker in the 1990s to Andrew Adonis to Michael Gove, politicians have led a real rise in standards. Across much of Britain the academic (as opposed to the social) case for choosing an independent school has never been weaker. The state now puts up stiff competition.’

The first ( apart from the claim that private education, rather than disastrous comprehensive state schooling, is the key to maintaining the class gap) is a simple statement of fact. The second is top-quality, fresh-from-the-cow, four-letter tripe. The alleged improvement in the state schools is, if it exists at all, from such a low level that in most cases they do not begin to approach the standards of the private schools or of the remaining academically selective grammar schools. Where they do,it is because they are selective in other ways, through tiny catchment areas mostly restricted to the wealthy, or by religious selection which cannot prevent people from faking their faith. Often there is a combination of the two.

The suggestion, of flooding the private schools with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of assisted places is thoughtless idiocy. They aren’t big enough, and wouldn’t be so good if they were. These schools currently educate 517,000 pupils in 1,200 schools (an average of about 430 per school) . They could not physically survive an influx of pupils on such scale.

The conclusion, that it’s OK to sneer at public school products, is cheap and rather nasty playing to the gallery. Plenty of public school boys and girls may well be recipients of unappreciated privilege, though this is less so than ever at the good ones, which have long selected by examination, though obviously mostly from among those who can pay. Thousands of others benefit from bursaries which in some cases pay all their fees, financed by contributions from richer parents. But this is obviously limited. What else are they supposed to do?

Until 1975, when (without noticeable Tory opposition) Labour’s Fred Mulley abolished the Direct Grant, scores of first-rate private day schools took in huge numbers of state-school pupils thanks to a wise government subsidy. It was done entirely on merit. They had generally passed the eleven- plus at a high level. Their pupils stormed Oxford and Cambridge, elbowing aside the public school hoorays. But the4 scheme relied on the continued existence of state grammar schools and of academic selection as a whole. And by 1975, Tony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher together, ably succeeded by Mr Mulley and soon afterwards to be succeeded by Shirley Williams, were well on the way to destroying the grammar schools.

It is that destruction which has led to the class advantages which Mr Parris mentions, which also apply (though he does not mention it ) to the elite state comprehensives which select by wealth, and which a New Labour Tory, Matthew Hancock, now proposes to challenge by encouraging employers to probe the class backgrounds of job applicants.

Well, I think it odd that Classism of this kind should be encouraged when all other imaginable forms of discrimination are so frowned on. I am reminded of the behaviour of the new ‘People’s Democracies’ such as Communist Czechoslovakia, which actively discriminated against the middle class in their early years, for reasons I think it is pretty easy to work out.

Once, I suppose, it would have been worth pointing out that this is the policy of a nominally Conservative government. But do I have any readers left who do not understand that the Tory party is now New Labour in arms, wholly dedicated to the Blairite Eurocommunist agenda – equality of outcome for everyone except the political and business elite?

Of course a serious conservative, and a responsible democratic socialist alike, would agree that the best way to tackle this problem would be the immediate re-establishment of academic selection, grammar schools and the Direct Grant. But such people are rare in politics.

Matthew Parris should know a lot better. Does he really think that ‘The present public mood of sneering at public-school toffs is healthy. The brand must be trashed.’? Is he genuinely unaware of a far better ,more effective alternative – the restoration of academic selection in state schools, and of the Direct Grant? Perhaps he is. I hope he now considers it. His voice, on the side of this much-needed reform, would be very valuable.

…. I am still interested in the slow absorption of this country into the great python that is the EU. The other day the subject of English law came up – the absolute reason, for me, why Britain should not be in the EU, since our law is not compatible with Continental law and any convergence is bound to mean the disappearance of our traditions.

Bert the Pretentious refuses to believe that the EU has any influence over events in this country at all (he is *still* , after several years, searching for an explanation of the revolution in rubbish collection which does not involve its actual cause, the EU Landfill Directive) . He responded to this point by commenting (in response to contributions by others)

@young Aussie John, Alan Hill and David Taylor, No, you continue to be wrong. Young John - any evidence for your assertion that there is a 'clear drive to uniformity in law'? Specific evidence, I mean, not just vague stuff about how the EU wants to turn everything into greater Germany, or similar.

I replied***PH writes: the origin of this drive is generally understood to be the Tampere EU conference, held in that Finnish town on October (apologies for originally wrongly dating this in December 1999.PH) 15th and 16th 1999 'on the creation of an area of freedom, security and justice in the European Union.' http://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/tam_en.htm gives details. The European Arrest Warrant, which overrides Magna Carta protections, is one product of this agenda. The justiciability of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (not to be confused with the ECHR) at the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg (&&NB This was a stupid error on my part. I know perfectly well that the ECJ is in Luxembourg and is unconnected with the ECHR in Strasbourg. It just goes to show how the mind and the fingers may not always be fully linked&&) is a principal means by which law can be brought into line.

This creates by stages a European area of justice and convergence in civil law. There have also been discussions on creating an EU 'Corpus Juris' a European Legal Area, a European Public Prosecutor and a European Criminal Code. These are in fact logical developments of the Single Market. Perhaps coincidentally, English criminal law has been growing to resemble continental systems. On-the-spot penalties, or 'restorative justice' under which resort to the courts is discouraged, have replaced many magistrates court proceedings (in contravention of the Bill of Rights 1689 and the principle of the presumption of innocence). A huge number of, perhaps most, criminal cases never go to court but are tried bureaucratically by the Crown Prosecution Service, functioning as an examining magistracy on the Continental Model. The absolute right to Jury trial is ceaselessly whittled away, and juries themselves are eviscerated by majority verdicts and the inclusion of the wholly uneducated and inexperienced on jury panels. Once again, Bert demonstrates his profound knowledge of the non-existent alternative world (where, for example, the EU Landfill Directive has no bearing on rubbish collection) and his ignorance of the real world, where the EU increasingly takes over our lives. I hope he has an enjoyable evening trying to rake the Moon out of the nearest pond. ****

I sent the same reply (minus the sarcastic remark about moonraking) to Mr ‘Bunker’, who had written from his Teutonic fastness:

‘John, Alan and Thucydides - this intrigued me so I tried to find evidence of an EU drive to get rid of British common law. All I could find on the subject was a 2014 article by Brenda Hale, Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the UK in which she stated, inter alia: "After more than a decade of concentrating on European instruments as the source of rights, remedies and obligations, there is emerging a renewed emphasis on the common law and distinctively UK constitutional principles as a source of legal inspiration," She also said that there was a "growing awareness of the extent to which the UK's constitutional principles should be at the forefront of the court's analysis". Has anything happened in the meantime to change that? Or is all this just more anti-EU scaremongering?’

Bert, as is usual when he is challenged and rebutted, fell into a profound silence which has lasted ever since. He is not given to responding when it doesn’t suit him, but will pop up again soon with a completely different contradiction, prompted by his difficulty, a desire to oppose anything I say under any circumstances.

Mr ‘Bunker’, by contrast, favoured me with a reply. He wrote : ‘I'm very grateful to Mr Hitchens for his interesting information. But I still have one or two questions: - The 1999 Tampere Conference - was the UK not represented at it? - The European Arrest Warrant - did the UK have no say in its establishment? - The European Charter of Fundamental Rights - was the UK not represented when it was drawn up? - The European Court of Justice in Strasbourg - does the UK have no participation in this body? - The proposed creation of "an EU 'Corpus Juris' a European Legal Area, a European Public Prosecutor and a European Criminal Code" - has the UK no opportunity to use its influence (veto) here?’

I responded : ‘***PH notes: A. Blair, Jack Straw and Robin Cook were all at Tampere, if he finds that reassuring. The Lisbon Treaty , signed by Gordon Brown in 2009, made the ECFR binding in EU law. Britain was represented on the 1999-2000 European Convention, which drew up the ECFR, by Timothy Kirkhope , a Tory MEP., Lord Bowness, a Tory peer with a background in local government, and the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith of Baghdad (joke). The UK has no substantive veto in most EU decisions, having accepted 'qualified majority voting' in almost all areas of decision making, a system which gives the UK no special power to oppose the majority, which is of course already wedded to civil code, jury-free justice.

‘I believe that QMV is the agreed system in 'security and justice' and judicial co-operation' since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty. I believe the UK has lost most of the QMV votes on which it has sought to challenge the Commission on any subject. The EAW is an interesting case, as, thanks to a quirk of Lisbon, the UK was allowed (uniquely as normally the 'acquis communautaire' of past EU law cannot be reversed), to opt out of it. But last year the Cameron government ,as mentioned on this site, voluntarily decided to opt back in though it was free not to. The abolition of English justice has plenty of supporters in the English elite, as the Auld Report of 2002 shows. (See my 'Abolition of Liberty') . The European Court of Justice has 28 judges of whom I believe two are currently from the UK. But like all EU functionaries, they are required to observe and enforce the laws of the EU, not act as representatives of the country or rather member state' from which they come.***

Mr Bunker had continued: ‘In other words, if - as is claimed - common law is in danger of being superseded by European law - is this being done by a scheming pack of unelected, unaccountable foreigners in Brussels and Strasbourg, as some contributors intimate, or is it being done with the full compliance and collaboration of the UK? -- Or is it not really in danger at all?’

I replied ‘ ***PH asks: Who has referred to 'a scheming pack of unelected, unaccountable foreigners in Brussels and Strasbourg,'? (Strasbourg is the seat of the European Court of Human Rights, unconnected with the EU and part of the Council of Europe, a separate and distinct body). This looks like a pack of straw men to me. What has taken place is all perfectly normal EU procedure, the endless drive towards ever-closer union, accepted by us in 1972, which goes on 24 hours of every day and occasionally comes to light in a conference or a treaty. As for ' the full compliance and collaboration of the UK', one would have to ask whether, given the alarming and comically confident ignorance of these matters in the cases of Mr 'Bunker' and of Bert, one can really describe this process in that way. It has never been put to the British people as such, or debated fully in Parliament, and is rarely covered in the media. The compliance of the British state is not the same thing as the compliance of the British people. ***

Mr Bunker then replied again: ‘Again I must thank Mr Hitchens for those interesting facts, many of which were indeed unknown to me. I'm no expert on EU law and have never claimed to be. So I gladly take note of the fact that the UK doesn't always have a right to veto but - if I understand correctly - the UK quite freely relinquished this right, fully aware of its consequences. So I see no EU "drive" there And quite apart from that, why should the UK have "special power to oppose the majority"? If Britain's in the EU, it should abide by the rules and not seek special powers. OK, I know Mr Hitchens didn't say it should, but nor did I say that the EU was "ruled by a scheming pack of unelected, unaccountable foreigners in Brussels and Strasbourg", I said that is merely the tenor of quite a lot of contributors to this blog. That's all. I'm surprised to hear that the "abolition of English justice has plenty of supporters in the English elite". I wonder why! But I'm not surprised to hear that the British judges in the European Court of Justice "are required to observe and enforce the laws of the EU, not act as representatives" of the UK. That principle, I imagine, applies to all the judges and I believe it is right. Does anyone think differently? Strasbourg - it was Mr Hitchens, not me, that introduced Strasbourg into the discussion, so I reject any charge of "strawmen" here.’

I responded ‘ ***PH writes: Mr Bunker is correct. I was trying so hard to say 'Luxembourg', where the ECJ is in fact based, that I did the opposite of what I intended and wrote 'Strasbourg' . My apologies, both for the error and for blaming Mr 'Bunker' for it. But I am baffled by his general drift. No opponent of the EU in Britain is under any illusions about the support of many members of his own country's elite for British absorption in the superstate. And Mr B will have to read Booker and North's 'Great Deception' for the details, but the abolition of the veto (which Mr Bunker himself still seemed to think existed) was of course done in quid pro quo negotiations, in which there was little realistic hope of escape from QMV short of walking out altogether. Either the veto was an important argument or it wasn't. But Mr Bunker raised it as it was - and now, having learned it is dead and gone, he pretends that he never thought it mattered In the first place. Personally I think its abolition very significant, and I doubt if the 1975 referendum would have gone the way it did if voters had known the veto would ultimately be abolished***

Mr Bunker had continued :’The "endless drive towards ever-closer union", Mr Hitchens tells us, was actually accepted (!) by the UK back in 1972, so I see no reason to blame the EU. True, the British people may not be in agreement with the idea of the EU, but if they aren't they should blame their own representatives (MPs) whom they elected to act in their interests, and not the EU.’

I replied :’ ***PH writes: On this we agree. I have never blamed anyone else but our own rulers’***

Mr Bunker had continued :’I'll ignore the charge of comical ignorance and explain that I speak from direct personal experience of almost half a century of life in the EU and having a passable interest in its workings. And as for Common Law, which is what this discussion was originally about, I have seen no particular advantage in it over the legal system of the European Union. But I'm always willing to learn. As I have done from Mr Hitchens' kind interventions.

****

AS far as I know this is the end of MR Bunker’s responses. While his reaction ( as always in his case good-natured and personally generous) is infinitely preferable to Bert’s unresponsive silence, I note that he hasn’t really allowed himself to be influenced by the facts and arguments presented to him.

The original question was ‘is there a convergence’? And then ‘is it driven by the EU?’. Well, I think the very existence of the Tampere conference (whose aims came as something of a surprise to many attendees, as far as I can find out) is evidence that it is. Opponents of the EU have never claimed that their fellow-countrymen have been guiltless in entangling us in this thing. Rather the contrary. Some secessionists ( not I) even claim to have been misled about the nature of the project, thinking it to have been a free trade area. I don’t think this stands up. Several opponents of the original Common Market, including Hugh Gaitskell from the mainstream, pointed out from the beginning that it was a political project. Anyone who didn’t know that by 1975 hadn’t been paying attention and wasn’t qualified to vote.

But rather than accept that he was ill-informed, and the EU is indeed seeking a convergence of legal forms, Mr Bunker swam off into a bog of irrelevance, making up stuff about ‘a scheming pack of unelected, unaccountable foreigners’ so as to caricature, rather than consider, my case. He then kept asking whether British representatives had any role in these changes. Well, of course they di, thiough you will struggle to find much coverage of the event in British media, or discussion of it in Parliament for – like much of the EU – it is poorly understood and poorly reported here. The main purpose of political journalists in EU meetings is to write stories claiming that the British premier of the day has ‘;triumphed’ in some way or other, whether he has (seldom) or has not (usually).

by me, the rejection of Roman Law was important in the development of English liberty, as (this is my interpretation) Roman Law tends to side with authority, whereas Common Law tends to insist on the law being above all. Which is often very inconvenient for authority.

Mr Bunker, leading his blameless life untroubled by authority, will never have had cause to discover the difference, and so no doubt he sees no great advantage in the English system over the continental one. Well, the difference between a safe car and an unsafe one only becomes evident in a collision or a storm. But one is still safer than the other, even if neither ever encounters a collision or a storm.

But I would be obliged if he ( and Bert) would have the generosity and civility to concede that they were ill-informed, and that the EU does indeed have an active policy of bringing about convergence in matters of law and justice.

29 May 2016 1:56 AM

Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words. I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion.

This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes.Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.

He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse. It may be that some in the sugar industry might have been involved. These days he would have been called a ‘fat-threat denier’, or something of the kind. He died in 1995, too soon to see his ideas rescued and taken seriously again.

Even now, people are getting needlessly fat and dying of horrible diseases because the anti-fat (and pro-sugar) lobby still hasn’t been completely routed. It will be, but these things take time. I mention this not just because it’s true, but because it’s an example of how thoughtless worship of scientists gets us repeatedly into trouble. Doubters like me are told not to dare criticise the sacred men in white coats.

But scientists disagree among themselves and are often wrong. In fact, science progresses by exploding dud theories of the past. And laymen are perfectly entitled to apply facts and logic to what these people say. The obvious argument against the skimmed-milk fanatics is that decades of this policy have left us with more fat people than ever. But we should not have had to wait so long.

There is powerful evidence against many other things now accepted as true, and often very weak evidence for them. I’d name ‘antidepressant’ pills, ‘dyslexia’, ‘ADHD’ and ‘man-made climate change’.

Those who criticise these things are angrily hushed, with righteous cries of ‘How dare you!’, and if they won’t shut up, they are punished – as was John Yudkin. Yet I believe in all these cases the critics will be proved right, as Professor Yudkin was. The miserable thing is that so much damage will be done while we wait for the truth to get the upper hand.

Be less trusting of all fashionable ideas, is my advice. Gullibility and conformism never advanced civilisation by a single step.

Jailed... for a very odd non-crime

In the same way that we have to allow free speech to those we despise, we must be most careful to ensure justice for those who are different from us, and with whom we can’t easily sympathise.

So a nasty shiver ran up and down my spine when I saw that Lorna Moore, a convert to Islam who married a Muslim, has been locked up for a very odd offence.

In fact, I know of no other offence like it in English law. This young mother has been imprisoned for not informing on her husband. I’ve yet to see any conclusive proof that she actually knew he was planning to join a terror group. Somehow or other, a return ticket to Majorca was taken as evidence that she was planning to run away to Syria with a husband she loathes.

And my English heart revolts at the idea of a wife being forced by law to inform on her husband. This is sinister, totalitarian stuff, alien to everything we stand for.

Those who drafted the 2000 Terrorism Act should be ashamed of enacting it. Can they have meant to lock up this person, so undangerous that she was allowed to be out on bail for three months between conviction and sentence?

Will it be children next, snatched into custody for not sneaking to the police about their parents’ conversations? This reminds me of the nauseating cult of Pavlik Morozov, whom Soviet children were taught to revere because he reported his father to the secret police.

There used to be a statue of this little monster (who was promptly and understandably murdered by his grandfather) in the middle of Moscow.

But while even Vladimir Putin doesn’t encourage such things nowadays, we in Britain are moving towards the all-powerful state, on the excuse of combating terror.

As it happens, Lorna Moore had every reason to do her husband harm if she had wanted to. She went into the witness box (a dangerous thing for a guilty person to do) to say convincingly that she hates her husband, who was given to shoving her head down the lavatory.

To make the matter even more odd, the husband involved hasn’t actually been convicted of doing the thing his wife didn’t tell the police about.

Indeed, he has sent an email to British media saying he isn’t actually in Syria, but in Turkey. Are the rest of us truly free when people can be locked up for such things? I don’t feel so.

One more lie in the drugs 'war'

The trumpeted ‘ban on legal highs’ is a fiction, like the rest of our drug laws. The new Act imposes no penalties at all for possessing these dangerous poisons – except for people who are already in jail.

This is an amazing giveaway of the Government’s real drugs policy, which is to look the other way while pretending to be ‘tough’.

In fact, simple possession of cannabis, heroin or cocaine is now hardly punished at all, even though it is illegal.

Claims that this ‘frees up’ the police to pursue ‘evil dealers’ are not backed up by the figures. Prosecutions for these offences stay about the same each year.

It makes no sense. The thing that makes the dealers, importers and growers evil is the damage that the drugs actually do to their users and their families.

The final, crucial link in this wicked chain is the purchase of the drug by the user. Yet this is the one thing we don’t punish.

Users are let off, or treated as if they are the victims of an irresistible disease.

*****

One of the reasons why too few people criticise the feebleness of the modern police is that they know they will then be bombarded with spiteful and abusive letters and tweets from workers in this arrogant and unresponsive nationalised industry.

If the police responded to calls for help from the public as quickly, persistently and numerously as they react to justified criticism, they’d be a lot more use.

******

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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26 May 2016 5:13 PM

In the endless debate about how comprehensive education has failed (which it certainly has in Britain) I am often told about the supposed success of that sort of schooling in the rich (high GDP per capita) and tiny city state which is Finland.

Well, one point is precisely that. Finland is not blighted by the industrial and agrarian revolution which gave Britain so many harshly-divided big cities, nor by recent mass immigration on an unprecedented scale, Finland does not (I believe) have a snobbish class system comparable to ours. It would never have wasted so many of its bright children in the first place. A fully comprehensive school system (if such a thing can exist) would not be half as damaging there as it is here.

But leaving all that aside, the Economist (which I often deride for its bumptious liberal certainties on foreign and domestic policy) has done one of the things that it *is* good at, namely dispassionate coverage of a country which is barely reported in the British press.

A brief registration process will allow you to read the article to which I refer

Which shows that the great Finnish comprehensive triumph is not quite so triumphant after all. The PISA study( dubious but all we have) suggests declining results and a widening gap between rich and poor .

And, wouldn’t you know ‘well-off parents are renting flats near good schools and entering pupils for competitive music classes to game the system.’

You mean that, despite being so brilliantly comprehensive, Finland has ‘good schools’ and not-so-good ones? Well, I never. I wonder if they could possibly be found in areas where better-off people live?

'Why I Changed My Mind RADIO 4, 8.45PM : Dominic Lawson's final guest in this too-short series is journalist Peter Hitchens, tracing how he changed his political opinions from radical left to radical right. The "radical" is important as he conforms to no accepted model but always argues a clear and logical case with which you may not agree but usually admire because of its beautiful construction and his passion as an advocate. He used to have a show of his own on Talk Radio but, because he doesn't conform to any right-wing stereotype, it didn't last. Pity. He's a grand match for Lawson.'

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23 May 2016 3:29 PM

Does a great fictional creation excuse an unloveable life? I suspect so. I think ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ a wonderful thing, both in prose and in its TV version – even though my surname is given ( I suspect deliberately) to an unpleasant character, the boon companion of a savage old reactionary judge, in one of the last Rumpole stories.

I didn’t like John Mortimer. I didn’t like the part he played (as a lawyer) in the trials of the Cultural Revolution, defending the horrible ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ and that forerunner of the dreadful wave of amoral ‘harm reduction’, ‘The Little Red Schoolbook’ (then revolutionary, now commonplace) . I especially didn’t like his less famous and less well-documented role in making the world safer for pornography in the years after the Chatterley trial allowed practically anything to be published. And I said so, in print, while he was still alive, which is why I think my name was taken in vain in that story (don’t ask me which one. The last Rumpole stories were not the best and I do not think I kept it).

the leftish lawyer Geoffrey Robertson recalled ‘John put on his wig and took off his glasses, so he could not see some of the trash he was called upon to defend with a success that drew rage from Mary Whitehouse and an extravagant attack from the Times, which claimed that no jury was immune to his charm.

‘The Williams committee on obscenity, reporting in 1980, agreed with Kenneth Tynan in crediting John with achieving a de facto freedom for the written word by his victorious defence of Inside Linda Lovelace (1973), a shabby little book that would have gone unnoticed had the DPP's office not decided to dignify it with a prosecution, after which it sold a million copies.’

I have always disliked that giggly little bit about taking off his glasses. If he wasn’t prepared to look at it with his glasses on, why was he ready to defend it, and presumably be paid pretty well for doing so?

When two rival biographies were published of him, I tended to think the more hostile of the two was closer to the truth. The picture of him ( I think it’s undeniably him) in Penelope Mortimer’s stinging little novel ‘the Pumpkin Eater’ is unappealing.

Yet heavens, he could write. His play ‘A Voyage Round My Father’ is a greatly moving tribute to his extraordinary parent, which has been performed by some of our greatest actors and will I think survive well into the future. His memoir ‘Clinging to the Wreckage’ is also a pleasure to read, and moving into the bargain.

And Rumpole is the nearest thing anyone has come to producing a rival to Sherlock Holmes. The trick is the same – a central character whose powers are far greater than the police or the public ever understand (they have plainly never read the stories) . This character has an odd domestic life, an astonishing intellect and recall, an idiosyncratic way of thinking – and a lot of the sort of luck that makes a story satisfying to the ordinary reader, who views storytelling as a pleasure to be savoured, not an art to be admired.

Instead of the Baker Street rooms, we have the ancient, cramped barristers’ chambers at Equity Court, with their busy clerks’ room, their aged, unemployed tenants and their wonky wiring – and Pommeroy’s wine bar (El Vino to the life) around the corner. Instead of Dr Watson failing to understand Sherlock Holmes, we have Mrs Rumpole ‘She Who Must be Obeyed’ , utterly unable to understand Rumpole’s joys or ambitions or methods, and spending his meagre fees on tins of Vim (look it up if you don’t remember it. She once memorably says to him ‘You’d miss it if it wasn’t there, Rumpole!) before he can spend them on drink.

Rumpole never becomes respectable. He is always looked down on by the smarter lawyers in his chambers (except for the women, who grasp his genius) , and he is loathed by the series of dyspeptic, merciless and unfair judges whom he teases and rags. As none of his clients read the stories about him, he is quite often hired in the expectation that this shabby, scruffy Old Bailey hack is bound to lose the case – and then upsets the plot by winning. And every episode is steeped in the poetry of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (still the best collection ever made) . Tennyson, Wordsworth, Blake and Flecker are ceaselessly called in to aid Rumpole’s thoughts.

These are devices. But thanks to that fine actor Leo McKern ( and to a small group of others who so perfectly understood the point of the stories, and presumably to a brilliant director) Rumpole flew higher and further than his own inventor’s conception. This can be compared to the way John Thaw turned Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse into an international star, but while John Thaw was hugely different from the original Morse of the pre-TV books, Leo McKern made Rumpole even more like Rumpole than he already was.

I’ve been watching several of the original TV programmes, made by Thames TV starting in 1978, before Mrs Thatcher destroyed the old independent television franchises which allowed the bigger ITV companies to make programmes that rivalled the BBC. They are wonderful in so many ways – partly because of their portrayal of the pre-1979 world, and then of the early Thatcher era. It is clear from this that the country has undergone a revolution since then. They use quite a lot of location shooting in the London of the time, shabby, with far less traffic and far fewer people on the streets, inevitably much more English. Female barristers are a novelty. The SDP is a novelty too. Judges still speak a vanished patrician tongue, carry gloves and nosegays and trundle to their lodgings in ancient Rolls Royces - though in one episode, presumably to reassure or beguile American viewers, an anomalous gavel, never used by English judges, appears on one judge’s desk.

The past comes to life. The police are cynics but not politically correct ones, courtrooms are still panelled and furnished in dark wood and the ancient tongue-twisting jury oaths (apparently designed, though nobody admitted this, to catch out the poorly-educated and illiterate so they could be stood down) which I recall from my days, four decades ago, as a court reporter, are still in use.

Every case in court is mirrored by some domestic grapple with She Who Must be Obeyed, or by a row in chambers . But over and over again the viewer, while being entertained, is also educated in English law. The presumption of innocence – and its importance - is explained again and again in practice, whether it be in the trial of an alleged bankrobber or of an African politician. I wish they’d repeat them now on a mainstream channel. People would be amazed that something so literate was ever made for primetime TV. .

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After getting the usual wave of silly, resentful attacks from police officers, for daring to criticise their complacent and liberal nationalised industry, I looked out this old article from the Mail on Sunday of 27th July 2004, written nearly 12 years ago. This is before discontent with modern policing was as widespread as it is now, and also before the police had been wholly revolutionised by the post-Macpherson inquisition and many officers from the old tradition were still in positions of responsibility. It explains a lot.

You may sometimes wonder why modern police officers are so word-perfect in the language of liberal political correctness. You may be puzzled as to how a generally conservative organisation, which once chased thieves and bad people in a fairly straightforward way, has suddenly become so keen on pursuing racism, homophobia and the other thought-crimes that obsess political radicals.

Here is part of the answer. They have been carefully and systematically trained in the Newspeak of the New Left, who know very well just how influential the trusted blue uniform of the British police constable is. I have been shown a document that has for some years been used to train officers in what is called 'Community Awareness'.

It smacks of the re-education camp and the thought police, and about half the people of this country would find it quite disturbing.

The other half, who have grown up since ultra-liberal ideas took over the schools and most of the media, may not be so surprised. The progress of the cultural revolution over the past two decades is so gigantic that the whole idea of what is shocking and what is not has altered.

One part of our country barely understands what the other one thinks any more. But where the two nations clash in any state-controlled body or big company, it is the new thinking that always seems to win.

See what you make of it. The booklet, originally produced by Kent Police in 1999, has been copied by some other forces and, I'm told, is typical of the sort of course officers must undergo. It is currently being revised to take account of - you've guessed it - European Union directives on religion and sexual orientation.

It is clever and subtle. It is what it does not quite say that is most worrying. I believe the assumption behind it is that many police officers - too young to be retired or otherwise easily got rid of - are guilty of crude prejudices and must be made to feel ashamed of them.

If they bridle at a course such as this, then they will wreck their careers because their chief constables have plainly put their authority behind the ideas in it. But if they submit to it, they will ever afterwards be tamed and neutered.

It opens with a 'self-assessment' quiz. The student is invited to agree or disagree with such statements as 'The UK is a multicultural society', 'Everyone has some prejudices', 'I will always challenge inappropriate language or behaviour', and 'We must adapt our policing practices to suit various cultures'. The instructions say: 'Answer as honestly as you can.' At the end of the booklet, the quiz is repeated. There is a suggestion that the student should go back and look at his original answers. You would have to be a prize fool not to realise that you are expected to have shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other as a result of ploughing through the pages in between.

It is courses such as these, I suspect, that have led to the new climate of fear in which officers are afraid of speaking openly even among formerly trusted colleagues in case they are denounced for some incorrect slip-up, and so lose their jobs and even their pensions.

Certainly, I am amazed and distressed by the number of serving police officers who write to me about the state of the force and beg me not to identify them in any way.

Yet it is so hard to pin down the insidious nature of this material. You catch it on the edge of a remark, passing by so fast that - if you are not paying attention - you don't realise the importance of it.

Take, for instance, the section on Britain as a multicultural society. All the facts are correct, but the way they are presented is thoroughly questionable. Yes, Romans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans and Jews all came to or lived on these islands in the previous 2,000 years.

But from 1066 until very recently, there were very few immigrants of any kind to this country, and Britain developed its own distinct national character - to which those immigrants adapted.

But the booklet tries to suggest this has always been a diverse, multicultural country. 'The whole history of Britain's population is one of ebb and flow of different peoples and tribal groups,' it claims.

For the most important 900 years of Britain's history, from 1066 to the Sixties, this simply was not true, and is the reason for our unique language, customs, institutions, religious opinions, laws - and our unique ability to sustain policing by consent, by unarmed officers.

It is only since the Sixties that the reformers have sought to change the country to suit the supposed wishes of migrants, rather than requiring migrants to conform to local customs.

What would happen, I wonder, to an officer who had the nerve to point this out to the 'Community and Race Relations Training Department'?

The booklet then asks, 'Is there any such thing as a "True Brit"?' and replies that 'the historical background and cultural diversity of Britain suggests this is an impossible question to answer'.This quiet demolition of a cherished loyalty to a proud and rather enviable civilisation seems to me to be as cruel as it is untrue, and the very heart of what is wrong with this creepy brainwashing.

Much of the rest of it seems designed to demonstrate that there is almost no way to avoid being racist, however hard you try. The use of the expression 'non-white' is allegedly 'felt to be offensive and racist' by unnamed persons because it 'defines people by what they lack and implies that being white is normal/superior'.

Perhaps for those baffled as to why a Black Police Association is encouraged whereas a White Police Association would be (rightly) denounced, the pamphlet asks: 'Can minorities be racist?' The answer appears to be: 'Not really.' It says: 'Minorities may of course have prejudices relating to the majority group and may sometimes act on these. Whether it is appropriate to refer to this as racism is debatable (remember that Racism = Prejudice + Power). If it is so referred a more appropriate term would be "reactive racism".

'In this sense the minority is reacting to majority power or dominance . . . by possibly using derogatory remarks for whites and promoting the image "black is beautiful", for instance.' The experienced constable or sergeant confronted with this knows one thing for certain - that he can never be sure, for the rest of his time in uniform, that he will not commit some sort of speech crime.

He may also quietly conclude that the really wicked aspect of racism - hate and fear based on skin colour - is not actually being challenged here. Such emotions are excused if they are felt by anyone apart from white English people.

But what can he do, by himself? Inch by inch, piece by piece, the world he grew up in has been dismantled and replaced by another. The same thing is happening to almost everyone he knows.

And so, the very people who would once have complained loudly about 'political correctness gone mad' find themselves enforcing exactly that.